Landmarks OKs $1.5B Domino Sugar project

The Landmarks Preservation Commission unanimously approved Two Trees Management’s $1.5 billion Domino Sugar Refinery project today, though the developer will need to make some additional revisions to its design.

Two Trees vowed to alter the project to account for the commission’s concerns about the visibility of glass rooftop features. Articulation was will be added to the façade, making the mechanical additions more visible and making a few changes to the chimney to make it more prominent from the east, a source told The Real Deal.

The commission had said last month it would not support the architecture firm Beyer Blinder Belle’s proposed designs if Two Trees did not make those changes.

“I’m delighted that this sensitive adaptive reuse project will restore life to this iconic building on the Brooklyn waterfront,” Robert Tierney, Landmarks chair and commissioner, said in a statement.

Six years ago, the shuttered factory at 292-314 Kent Avenue, along an 11-acre site on the Williamsburg waterfront, was designated a landmark.

Two Trees’ plans call for 2,284 apartments, 631,000 square feet of office space and a quarter-mile waterfront park. Around one-third of the 660 affordable housing units are to be in the first tower slated for construction.

Two Trees bought the site for $185 million in October 2012. Previous owners CPC Resources and Katan Group had planned to develop a 2,200-unit residential housing project that would have cost approximately $2.2 billion. However, the plan stalled in early 2012 and the joint venture decided to sell, when an agreement could not be reached.

Former Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz approved the plan just before leaving office, as previously reported.

When the project is completed, “it will be a great living monument to the industrial history of the East River waterfront and will reactivate this long-dormant building with thousands of new jobs, providing much needed space for North Brooklyn’s growing creative industries,” Dave Lombino, director of special projects for Two Trees, said in a statement. — Mark Maurer